A Celtic State of Mind’s Reviews – Daddy Long Legs’ dirty, swampy vampire blues

🎙 Daddy Long Legs
🎫 Broadcast
🗓 31 January 2020
✍🏻 Andrew Rafferty

Daddy Long Legs are a trio from New York, New York. But not just any trio.

There is no bass player in this band. Instead the guitarist, Murat Akturk lays down some mindbending sounds using a bottleneck slide to terrorize his semi-acoustic guitar. Josh Styles on drums eschews any kind of cymbals and batters his snare and toms with a maraca and a stick. The singer, Brian Hurd, alternates between vocal duties and some blazing blues harp. All of which creates a sound which catches the attention straight away.

They take to the stage in the cramped and packed to capacity Broadcast and begin to tear the place apart.

Death Train Blues kicks the show off. Hurd prowls and stalks the small stage, clutching an old-school lip mic and blues harp. The singer is decked out in Kentucky tie and longcoat. His words and appearance give off the vibe of Southern Preacher gone bad. Real bad. His fellow noise-makers carry menace in their appearance too, dressed as they are in southern vampire rock gear.

The sound is immense.

Styles pounds out a relentless rythmn which the other two build the songs around. The power and energy from Hurd in particular as the front man is outstanding. He throttles the harp, getting every possible ounce of dirty, swampy sound out of it. And this is the best way I can describe their sound.

Dirty, swampy vampire blues.

They smash through their one-hour set, changing things up for a while when Hurd picks up a guitar and shifts the sonics into a different plane.

They build the set up to a final blast through Motorcycle Madness, a song as brilliant as it sounds, before a final and genuinely requested encore.

The band leave the Broadcast crowd with their ears ringing as they stumble out into a wet Glasgow night which, for tonight at least, feels like somewhere between Louisiana and Chicago.